Designing and Recognition of Internal Transcribed Spacer Region in <i>Solanum</i> Species

Abstract

Identifying the authenticity of any material has been of great importance to people for decades. The use of plant-based therapy is of great interest to people all around the world. Today 1000 of plant varieties are being investigated by many researchers for their potential pharmaceutical activities. Apart from home remedies, these plant-based therapies are drawing the attention of several western countries towards patenting them for their commercial use. Even before formulation of a drug from plants, it is very essential to the purity of the variety to ensure the quality of the final product. When it comes to genome identification the first guess is always DNA barcoding. But the redundancy of the plant species towards evolution is the main reason why the closely related plant species are very difficult to classify. The mitochondrial can be preferred for DNA barcoding but has a disadvantage when it comes to plant varieties. Hence, to find the genomic uniqueness of <em>Solanum</em> species from our local area we opted for the utilization of internal transcribed spacers and found to be a partial ITS2 segment. The plant species were found similar to <em>Solanum supinum</em> and <em>Solanum virginianum</em>. The size of the amplified product was found to be 314, 350 and 346 bp, with respect to Sx1, Sx2 and Sx3. Although the sequence we obtained was partial ITS, it still helped us to identify the Solanum species found in our local region with great efficiency. Proper complete ITS2 sequencing is the perspective of the future work to be done.